There aren’t a lot of public opinion polls in Oakland concerning quality of life issues, but new one from shows some encouraging results: An overwhelming majority of Oaklanders (70%) want more cops, support surveillance technology like Flock cameras (64%), believe the Oakland Unified School District is an abysmal failure when it comes to management (78%), can barely tolerate Barbara Lee’s mayoralty (37% job approval, lower even than Donald Trump’s), believe “the taxes they pay aren’t worth the services they receive,” and “want encampments cleared—now” (79%).

I’m usually working on three books at a time. My bathroom book currently is “Becoming,” by Michelle Obama. My bedroom book is Gavin Newson’s “Young Man in a Hurry.” My kitchen table book is “John and Paul: A Love Story in Songs,” by Ian Leslie.

I love the way our human minds work by association. I was trying hard yesterday, for some reason I don’t recall, to recollect the name of a certain Sixties rock band from San Francisco. Jefferson Airplane? No, that wasn’t it. Not that famous. Not the Grateful Dead either. Something else, not so well known.

“Service Alert: BART is recovering from an earlier problem. There is a 20-minute delay system wide due to an earlier medical emergency at Embarcadero.”

Republicans, and some Democrats, say Gavin Newsom is just an ambitious twit. Yes, he is ambitious. I’ve known him since the early 1990s and his drive—for precisely what, I didn’t know back then, but it was evident he was in high-gear pursuit of something—was astounding. He clearly was a young man in a hurry. By 2000, I thought I’d figured out what he was in pursuit of: the presidency of the United States. And I was right.